if it was his pet dog he’d just beaten. Then he turned to the kids in the back. “Get out.”
Stunned from the whole fiasco, we didn’t move.
“Get out!” he repeated with more volume, and before we had time to go anywhere, he was chasing everyone toward the front door, swinging his bat like a madman, threatening to murder all of our mothers and grandmothers and sisters and daughters if we ever stepped foot in his business again.
The next Sunday, after our house-league basketball game at Saint Joseph’s Community Centre, the three of us returned to Fun Village Arcade. George didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow. Oleg — he’d just reached a season high, scoring fifty-six points — cautiously walked up to the counter and asked George to change his loonie for four quarters. Like a robot, without taking his eyes off the TV, George popped open his cash register, reached in, picked out four quarters, and dropped them into Oleg’s hand.
Charlie nudged my shoulder, winked, then hoarked a thick green loogie onto the floor. “Stupid wop,” he whispered, and we walked to the back of the arcade to play a game of Tekken, one-on-one martial-arts combat.
Only half, darling.
“Hell you looking at, buddy?”
No answer.
“What, you don’t speak English? No speak-ee, you?”
Run. Run away.
“Huh? No speak-ee?”
He was leaning against the outside of the school, next to the front entrance, a navy blue San Diego Padres cap tipped back on his head. He’d been glaring at every kid who walked out the door. Why’d he have to pick me to start with? I could swear I only glanced his way.
“You in the special class or something?”
“No.”
“Then how come you can’t answer a question?”
He swaggered up to the front steps, hands jammed into pockets. I stood still, fists clenched, anticipating a blow. But he didn’t touch me. Just stared at my forehead for about fifteen seconds as if there was a purple growth the size of a baseball sticking from it. Then he asked, “You go to school here?”
It was the first day of grade seven at Lawson Street Junior High. Oleg, my only friend, had gone to a different school.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Me, too.”
“You do?”
“No, I’m lying to you.” He shook his head, rolled his eyes. “The hell else would I be doing outside this place?”
“Dunno.”
“Shit, if I didn’t have to go to class, I wouldn’t walk in a ten-mile radius of this stupid building. You know it used to be a jail, right?”
“What?”
“This building, it used to be a jail. You knew that, right?”
“No.”
“You didn’t know that? I thought everybody knew that. Ten years back it was a maximum-security jail, this school.”
“Yeah?”
“You really didn’t know that, eh? Man, oh, man. I forget sometimes how stupid some people are. Our school, buddy, is where they threw all the craziest serial killers. The worst ones. Guys that chopped up their wives, raped their pets. And they all used to sleep in our classrooms. Used to lift weights in the playground. And also they chucked Mafia and skinheads and all types of serious gang members in there, too. People got stabbed in those hallways every day. Had to have somebody go around and clean up the blood with a mop … every day. And it was maximum security, right, so they used to have guards armed with machine guns surrounding the place. And there was a fifty-foot barbed wire fence, and they put a force field on the fence, and if you touched it, you got an electric shock so bad you’d be paralyzed for a week … or maybe two weeks, depending on how strong you were. But, man, oh, man, I don’t believe you didn’t know about the jail. I thought everybody knew about that.”
“Oh.”
He stared at me for about ten seconds as if I had the words I AM A MORON written with pink marker on my forehead. Then he said, “You know I’m joking, right?”
“What?”
“This place wasn’t a jail, buddy.”
“Oh.”
“The hell would anybody put a jail downtown like this? That’d probably be the stupidest idea in the world. This area is full of houses. What kind of idiot would wanna live around here if there was a maximum-security jail across the street?”
“Dunno.”
“You believed me, though.”
“No.”
“Yeah, you did. Don’t lie. You thought this school used to be a jail. I bet you were gonna go home and tell your mommy you wanna transfer schools ’cause you’re afraid the ghost of some pedophile is gonna sneak up on you when you go to take a piss. I bet you woulda stayed awake all night if I hadn’t told you I was joking. I saw the way you were looking at me. You believed me.”
“No.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I’m not.”
“Whatever, you stupid dumbass. It’s not my fault you’re an idiot.”
“But I didn’t —”
“The hell were you staring at me before?”
“What? I wasn’t.”
“You were staring at me when you walked out the door. The hell were you looking at?”
“Nothing. I wasn’t. I mean, I didn’t think I … You were staring at everybody that walked out the door.”
“That’s ’cause I’m waiting for somebody.”
“Oh.”
“It’s important who I’m waiting for.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t you wanna know who it is?”
“Who?”
“None of your business.”
“Oh.”
He scratched his chin for a little while, glanced at the ground. “Well, it’s a girl I’m waiting for. This sexy girl. Probably missed her, though. I told her to meet me here around two-thirty ’cause I figured I could get out of school early behind a teacher’s back. But none of the teachers
